Spotify‘s SVP of strategic partnerships Paul Brown is to leave the music streaming service this week for a new startup outside of the digital music space.

Brown tells Music Week it was an opportunity he “had to take”, having been with Spotify for 18 months where he first joined as MD of the UK office, having previously worked at Pandora. However, he was quickly promoted to the role of strategic partnerships so it’s potentially a major loss for Spotify.

After securing the Premier League football online highlights rights away from Virgin Media, Yahoo! UK has debuted its “snack-sized” packages of the weekend’s games.

As well as being displayed prominently on the Yahoo! homepage, the portal’s sport section has been taken over by football highlights with the season kicking off on Saturday, as well as its advertisers, which include Adidas, Heineken, BT and Sony Pictures.

Funding Circle is a newly launched peer-to-peer lending site in the UK with a number of heavy-weight backers including Andy Homer, Chief Executive of Towergate Partnership, and Jon Moulton, the founder of private equity firm Better Capital and former managing partner of Alchemy Partners.

A sort of Zopa-for-small businesses, the ‘social lending platform’ facilitates loans to SMEs instead of individuals, giving lenders the opportunity to get an estimated 6 to 9 per cent return on their money. It’s also possible for lenders to get their money back before a loan is repaid by reselling their part of the loan onto other lenders, a first says the company and something that they think will be popular since in this instance interest can be earned immediately without the need to wait for the loan arrangement to be completed.

This a guest post by David Hickson co-founder of stealth start-up tribesports.com. David’s a 12 year Internet-veteran and self professed geek-wannabe. He previously spent 5 years at lastminute.com, and was a founding shareholder and Head of Corporate Development at mydeco.com.

I’m unlikely to give you an epiphany of Damascene proportions if I told you that the secret of scale on a budget is to activate the power of the people. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube don’t market – their users do. But even the venerable Facebook, with an active user-base about the size of Western Europe, is still having a good old think about whether to IPO or not. Although expected to hit revenues of $1bn in 2010, that is still a relatively small number, and there is very little focus in the Facebook rhetoric about the bottom line – possibly because it can’t yet be properly seen below its chubby server-belly.

Yet consider Expedia, Inc’s Tripadvisor’s numbers – with a tenth of Facebook’s visitors and a UX that could do with some work, it is expected to generate revenue closing on half that of Facebook, – with a whopping bottom line as near as dammit half that number again. Now that’s a business model.

MyHammer, the ‘handy man’ jobs site, has appointed Markus Berger-de León as CEO. He was formerly CEO of StudiVZ and Jamba and replaces Gerrit Müller who will now become MyHammer’s COO and General Manager International where he’ll oversee the Berlin-based startup’s pending Q4 U.S. launch.

MyHammer began in 2006 as an auction site for tradespeople and ‘handymen’ services but today operates as a “hybrid marketplace” combining a yellow pages directory and a jobs quotation marketplace. It aims to solve the problem of how to find good and qualified tradespeople or ‘handymen’ powered by more than 500,000 customer reviews which are tied to specific transactions.

Two years later and Magpie, the first service to offer in-stream advertising on Twitter, is being put up for sale.

It claims to be Europe’s number one Twitter advertising network with a combined reach of almost 20 million followers and has around 5,000 registered advertisers. Major brands who have used Magpie include the likes of Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox, Burger King, Honda, Heineken and many more. So why do its founders want out?

It’s tempting to think that the business model simply didn’t work out. For many, in-stream ads is sailing pretty close to spam. But that isn’t the case, says Magpie co-founder and CEO Jan Schulz-Hofen. “If it didn’t work we’d just shut it down.”

TechCrunch Europe is an interesting gig. There are 27 members of the “European Union”, 48 geographical European countries and territories, and 51 participating countries in the Eurovision Song Contest (surely, the ultimate gold standard of a chaotic definition of Europe). But we love them all. You guys rock. We have hundreds of languages, no unified single market and centuries of war and conflict behind us. But luckily, tech is here to the rescue. Whether you are working on a Twitter client in Romania (hello Seesmic guys!) or a teenager in a bedroom in the tiny country of San Marino dreaming of building your own Foursquare, we are all united by our fascination with technology. Which is why we want to reflect you.

So we’d like your guest posts for TechCrunch Europe, written by people on the tech scene in Europe.

Like New Hope, Pennsylvania, Corsica is most definitely not the first place that comes to mind when we talk about tech and innovation. For the geographically challenged, I should clarify that we’re talking about that island off the southern coast of France. You know, where Napoleon comes from – or more recently where Alicia Keyes got married (wow, never thought I’d put these two characters in the same sentence). It may be void of both Starbucks and McDonalds – but definitely not startups.

So essentially I’ve been on a quest to expose the startup activity in Corsica for a while now and oddly enough, the opportunity came at a time that is usually less active for French companies. Then again, when you work in Corscia, I guess you don’t really need to take a vacation.

I’ve often found myself countering the argument that the Internet is making us dumber by citing Google as a second brain: the search engine lets us remember stuff that we didn’t actually know, which is sort of true as connectivity becomes ubiquitous. But what if there was a service designed specifically to retrieve information that we have already come across but didn’t explicitly log for future use, perhaps because at the time it didn’t seem relevant or useful.

At a higher level, that’s the concept behind Sentimnt, a personal and social search engine that at its simplest aims to answer the question: “Where did I read that?”. It does this by connecting to a user’s Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Gmail and Delicious accounts, indexing all of the updates, articles, and resources that are referenced so that they can be recalled later.

The site is in private beta but TechCrunch Europe has invites (see below).

Flattr, the micropayment startup founded by ex-Pirate Bay associates, has opened to the public today. No longer will you need an invite in order to add the Flattr button to your web site as a publisher or to give support to the sites you visit with real money.

Flattr’s micropayments business model is based on the idea of people tipping content they like, Digg or perhaps Facebook Like buttons – but this time with real money. Users can “Flattr” content by setting up a Flattr account which sets a a monthly fee — a minimum €2 — that they are willing to contribute for any kind of online content. When the user finds something they like that has a Flattr button, they can click the button to “reward” the content provider. At the end of the month, the user’s monthly fee is split equally among the holders of the content that they “flattered”.

If you believe the analysts out there, social gaming is one of the biggest trends on the web right now. Most notably Zynga, the Valley-based Startup that brought us time consuming (and questionable products) such as MafiaWars or Farmville, definitely knows how to play the game – not only in terms of usage but also in terms of revenue, as a recent tear-down suggests.

Now Germany-based entrepreneur and well known speaker Ibrahim Evsan has teamed up with his longtime partner Thomas Bachem to dig into this lucrative and fun field. After founding Sevenload, one of Europe’s most successful video sharing sites, their new endeavor is called Up Web Game and their first product is on its way – Fliplife.

There has been lots of buzz around Blekko, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups. At the recent Social Currency CrunchUp CEO Rich Skrenta gave an impressive demo of their product and attendees got a first glimpse of Blekko’s powerful search engine.

Slense, an Austrian startup, which has been developed by bunch of Viennese PhD students recently launched and is in some way a Blekko competitor. The company’s goal is to establish a customizable and private search experience. By adding sources you know and trust – for now, just RSS feeds and your Delicious stream – Slense only displays results deemed relevant to you. Results improve not based on your historical search behaviour but on the primary sources you add, and from those external sites, the content is analyzed and via some sort of “peer reviewing”, weighted for future searches.

Talentag.com, which gets an ‘official’ launch today, is the new consumer-facing product from the team behind Emp.ly, the social recruiting startup.

It’s pitching itself as a “social CV”, and features the recommendation element of LinkedIn but adds Foursquare-style badges and traditional tags as a fun and quick way of soliciting a ‘thumbs up’ from co-workers and friends. Recommendations don’t just operate as a popularity contest, however, but can be tied to actual work roles that the user has had.

There are three main ways to finance a new car. A car loan, hire purchase or car leasing. And while there are plenty of comparison websites for loans, the Internet fares less well when it comes to providing sufficient comparative information for the other two types of car finance. More specifically, there hasn’t existed one site that helps car buyers compare all three types of car finance options, says FinanceAcar, a new UK startup that today has launched what it claims to be the world’s first car finance comparison engine.

Aiming to answer the question “what is the lowest monthly price I need to pay to drive the car that I want?”, at launch the site compares finance options from top UK lenders for 6,000 vehicles and offers more than 1,000,000 different prices.

Something strange has been happening. On more than one occasion I’ve received an irate email from a complete stranger demanding that I delete their Facebook account.

Of course, it’s not surprising that there are a few people that actually want to leave the uber social network – slippery privacy controls and the occasional security breach can have that effect – but to be mistaken for somebody who works at Facebook is a little odd. I’m not exactly known as the company’s number one fan.

Here’s one such email, entitled “Delete My Facebook Acct”:

Gigaboxx, the mobile music download platform targeting artists and record companies who want to set up shop to sell direct to fans, has opened in public beta.

The UK service, which was first outed in April at GeeknRolla, has a particular emphasis on live events – hence the mobile component – offering artists a “suite of marketing tools”, including their own store URL, QR codes and a SMS reply service that they can feature in promotional material and share on social networks. Additionally, Gigaboxx offers local Wifi and Bluetooth solutions that can be used at a live gig to beam a link to the artist’s download store direct to the audience’s mobile phones. Perfect for fans getting caught up in the moment.

Tagadas is a newly launched private buying club in the UK. Only unlike the more general designer offerings of Vente-Privee, Brands4friends and their various competitors, the London-based startup is attacking a more specific vertical: baby and children’s products from brands such as French Connection and Minihaha.

It could also be seen as a British version of US-based Zulily.com, a private buying club that like Tagadas, is targeting parents. Zulily recently received $6m in investment led by August Capital, with participation by existing investor Maveron, bringing the total raised to $10.4m, so it’s very well funded.

In comparison, Tagadas’ founder Samuel Serra (who previously co-founded ReceiptFarm with Matt Collins) has thus far bootstrapped the startup with his own money and that from friends and family, having originally tested demand via nothing more than a sign-up page and an adwords campaign. Today the site claims over 5,000 registered members, having only just opened its doors.

This is a guest post by Julian Ranger (@rangerj) an Angel investor and founder of Surrey, UK-based innovation hub iBundle. Current iBundle projects include Raffle.it. SocialSafe, mifiction and DAD. Julian has been an investor since 2007. Previously he was founder and Managing Director of STASYS Ltd, which he sold to Lockheed Martin in 2005.

Privacy is something we jealously guard in real life. We lock our doors, protect our bank details – we’re in control. But online it’s become a different story. Hardly a week goes by without a major government hack, social network outage or search engine breach: accusations of fault and blame are levied, and our trust is further eroded.

The debate has two camps: those that care and those that don’t.

Hotel recommendation engine, Gekko, has just announced the launch of GekkoLinks – a new technology that will definitely be of interest to travel publishers (and other industries to come).

By automatically recognizing hotel names within a text – even non-exact or fuzzy references – Gekkolinks is able to supplement any online travel content site with information from Gekko’s hotel database. After recognizing the hotel, Gekkolinks transforms the name into an affiliate link and supplies additional information and prices from multiple booking engines in the form of an Apture-like popup.